Synopsis and Structure
The poem begins with Tithonus speaking to Eos "at the quiet limit of the world" (line 7) where he lives with her. Confronted with old age and its attendant pains, he contemplates upon death and mortality, and mourns the fact that he being immortal, death cannot release him from his miserable existence. He recounts how Eos choosing him to be her lover had filled him with so much pride that he had seemed "To his great heart none other than a God!" (14).Though she ungrudgingly granted him immortality at his asking, he could not escape the ravages of time. The Hours aged him and his youth and beauty faded away− "But thy strong Hours indignant work'd their wills / And beat me down and marr'd and wasted me" (18-19). He asks Eos to set him free− "Let me go; take back thy gift." (27)− and questions why should one desire for that which is unattainable.
Eos departs at dawn without replying to his wish that she take back the boon of immortality that she had bestowed upon him. As she leaves him, her tears fall on his cheek. This fills Tithonus with the foreboding that the saying he had learnt on earth, that even "'The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'"(49), might be true. He remembers his youth when he would feel his whole body come alive at dawn as Eos kissed him and whispered to him words "wild and sweet" (61) which seemed to him like the song Apollo sang as Ilion (Troy) was being built. In the final section, weary of life and immortality, he longs for release from his wretched existence and yearns for death to overcome him. He feels that "men that have the power to die" (70) are happy and fortunate. He asks Eos that he be released and restored to the earth for his "immortal age" (22) can no longer be reconciled with her "immortal youth" (22):
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels. (72-76)
Read more about this topic: Tithonus (poem)
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.”
—Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)